The VideoLAN Forums

I just upgraded to 0.8.6. I'm finding that I'm unable to seek in mp4 (h.264+mp4a) files beyond the amount of time since I installed. Meaning, 15 minutes after I installed 0.8.6 I could seek within any mp4 file from 0 to 15 minutes but beyond that the video freezes and audio turns off. Now it's been 60 minutes since I installed 0.8.6 and I can seek within all my mp4 files from 0 to 60 minutes but beyond that no luck. I tried about a dozen files. Rebooting made no difference, only the time since I installed.

This is showing up identically on 2 computers or I would never have figured out the correlation. I've seen it before in 0.8.6 beta releases, and maybe in 0.8.5 as well, but never made the connection (problem goes away on its own after 2 hours since I don't have any h.264 files longer than that).

After I've been typing this note I tried yet another different file and now I can seek up to 70 minutes...

O_o

Is this a joke ?

No, it's not a joke. It probably has to do with a setting or registry keys, but somewhere in x264 decoding there's a counter going negative and messing up playback if you try to seek within a file soon after re-installing.

I can actually follow it along: I'll be skipping in 1 minute jumps until suddenly playback freezes, but if I go back a minute and watch the movie it goes over the bad time period without problem, but the minute ahead of THAT point is now the problem.

My guess is the pseudo-code would look like:

var safelyLargeNumber = (currentTime - installTime);

where (safelyLargeNumber - currentPosition) is used as an index somewhere in x264 or mp4a decoding.

But safelyLargeNumber is stored as an Unsigned variable!

I have had this happen too. Generally it's after Microsoft updates. You can wait a couple of hours and it clears itself or let the file play through and it clears itself.

Ah, so it's not a time value that's set by VLC installation, it's a Windows value that's being used/abused. Could have happened at the same time for me this time.

This issue is still not resolved (0.8.6.e)...